


Yellow Wallpaper

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ask Jeeves, Metafiction, Other, Shapeshifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 15:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2657366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Olivia was dead, before she was the maid, before she was Bunny's daughter, she was the woman in the attic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yellow Wallpaper

It is very seldom that they let Olivia see the grand halls and rooms of her residence—a catching glimpse as the door opens and then closes, and that is all.

They give her books, and these books sometimes have pictures of houses and homes and mansions and castles. She turns the pages, and wonders. 

They give her games too, but it takes two people to play these games, and she’s almost always alone, save when her mother comes, and they might play a game or two then.

Shadows flit across the crack of light beneath her door. They must be ghosts, for she has never seen their faces, only heard the slight sigh of their passing.

Their house is haunted, but when she tells her mother, she laughs, puts her hand on her head, strokes her hair, and calls her sweet young thing.

Then she leaves.

But she always leaves, so it is to be expected. But she always comes back, and that is expected too.

Mother is very practical. She’s never hidden why Olivia’s tucked away in the attic, out of sight and out of mind.

Olivia knows that she is a monster. She knows this because her mother told her so, and her mother never, ever lies.

Olivia also knows that her father was killed by a hunter, a hunter Mother named Bobby.

She hates Bobby for killing her father. What if she never has another father? There are no fathers here in the attic.

Philip doesn’t count. Philip doesn’t like her—she can tell in the stiff way he holds himself, in the way he refuses to speak to her beyond the necessities—here is your dinner, Bunny won’t be seeing you today, here is the aspirin you requested for your headache—and fathers always like their daughters, love them even, according to the books.

"Does Bobby hunt wabbits too?" Olivia asks her mother one day, when she’s a little older. 

Mother’s face blanches.

Olivia assures her she’s only referencing the cartoon.

There are no windows in the attic. It is very dark, and when it rains it is very dank, and there is a smell in the air that Mother says is mold. Mother describes the outdoors. She says the sun is yellow and hot. The grass is green and itchy. She has allergies, so in the summer she is always sneezing and wiping her eyes with her lace hanky. She cannot wear her mascara lest she smudge it. She has ruined many good hankies this way, she tells Olivia. She shows one of them to her—it is delicate, made of fine thread, and Olivia traces the threads with her fingertips. 

"I want to go outside," she tells her Mother. "We can do it at night, when everyone is asleep." 

Mother says no because mother knows best. If someone were to see—she could not bear to lose her as she had lost her father. This desire would pass, she’d see.

The desire never passed. 

It wasn’t that mother lied—she just didn’t know.

The days pass slower and slower. Olivia paces in circles in the small attic in time with the ticking seconds.

They tell her she is unwell and she must rest.

During the day, she lays on her cot, and during the night she sleeps on her cot and the ceiling is fixated and unchanging, like she is unchanging even when she shifts to a rat and looks for the nooks and crannies, but there are none. They have all been stoppered up.

Mother tells her that she is not to ask about going outside. Her face is twisted with rage or grief, Olivia can’t tell. 

But Mother loves her and does not want to lose her. She holds onto that. She bites her tongue when she wants to go outside lest she upset her mother.

Mother has forgiven Lance (who is not her father either for he does not know about her) or Lance has forgiven her—Olivia is never sure. But they are reconciled (for now), and Mother comes less frequently, more sporadically—and this also is to be expected.

Olivia shifts to pass the time. It creates a mess. Philip is enraged. 

"I’ll take it out to the trash myself," she says. But he doesn’t let her, and when he complains to her mother, she hears her step for the first time in days, and she runs to her, and her mother’s anger dissipates when she sees Olivia’s face.

She cups her cheeks, presses kisses to her forehead. 

"You’ve changed," she says. "You’re such a beautiful young girl." She smiles, something gracious and kind, instead of pinched and sad.

Olivia shifts and and shifts until she finds the face her mother loves best.

It makes her very tired, but her cot is always there for her, and sometimes, she even rests as they tell her she must always do. 

It is very tiresome living in the attic. 

But she remembers Bobby and her father, the man she’s never met, both men she’s never met, and maybe they are right to keep her safe in here from him.

Or maybe they should have done as Bobby did and, instead of living here scared of him, they should have killed him, as Bobby had done her father and tried to do to her.

What a scared fraidy cat Bobby must be, to kill the ones he feared the most.

If Bobby were ever to come here, she would not kill him out of fear.

She would kill him out of vengeance, which was not the same thing.

She holds on to that. She dreams about it.

When she’s a little older, nearly a young woman now or so she assumes because Philip keeps telling her a young woman like herself should behave better—Mother brings a surprise.

"I don’t want this to be an attic anymore," she says, holding her in her arms even though she was nearly taller than her mother now. "This is your room. Your home. We should decorate it as such." 

She pulls out the packages she’s brought. There’s shelves to carry the books she’s stacked in piles around the room—read and re-read until the spines have cracked and there are finger smudges on the pages—a tin pail for when she shifts, sprays of plastic flowers in decorative vases, and rolls of yellow paper to replace the peeling paint on the walls.

"Now it will always be like you have the sun shining in your room," her mother says.

Stuck in this drab place with the grey lighting and the grey-blue paint and the dim wooden floors, the bright yellow is almost too much for Olivia, lurid and obscene almost, and the smell of it burns her nose.

"Do you like it?"

Olivia tells her mother that she loves it, so that she might bring more things up to her. 

Olivia asks to set up the shelves and place the flowers first so that they might save the paper for last. Mother might stay more than a day, maybe the night too. 

Maybe, it would take them a whole week to finish papering the room, and Olivia is almost giddy because this would be the longest stretch of time she has ever consecutively spent with her mother.

It would be like they were living in the same place instead of Mother frequently coming up to visit with a devotion that Olivia treasured, as she listened eagerly to the terrible stories mother told of her terrible social obligations and how she tried to get out of them as frequently as possible, usually by feigning illness.

But Mother puts up half a wall of paper and then declares herself tired and that she must rest. She is gone before Olivia can offer her cot, and she stands, desolate, in the center of a grey room splashed with horrid yellow on one side.

She hates that yellow. She puts her hand along it, pressing against the wall. The glue is still damp. She could rip it down, roll it into a ball, kick it like she’s playing soccer, bending it like beckham, and then Philip would come and call her ungrateful and tell her mother and mother wouldn’t bring these home-things again, assuming that Olivia would not want something so nice, something that would make this attic not an attic. 

Sighing, she begins to put up more of the paper so that when her mother comes back, she will be surprised and impressed and tell her how proud she is of her initiative and her quickness in doing what is to be done.

Perhaps they will give her more to do if she finishes this room with this abhorrent yellow paper that hurts her eyes. Perhaps they will stop telling her to rest and to be quiet but will instead give her things to do, maybe eventually, letting her out if she did all these things so well.

Without her mother to distract her, Olivia notices the patterns in the yellow, a pattern she can’t follow, a pattern that shifts and changes and she’s suddenly revolted that this paper has something in common with her and, as she hurries to put up more paper to be done with it, she realizes something.

This is why her mother chose it. 

Because it reminded her of her. 

She sits down, arms hanging from her knees, fingernails scraping her shins, and stares at the yellow wallpaper.

There’s a spot, where it looks as if little flames are rising from it like candles, where the color dimples and changes, and Olivia’s breath catches when, for a moment, in that space before she blinks, she could have sworn she saw a woman on fire. 

When Philip brings her dinner—Mother is with Lance this evening—she drags him to the wallpaper, pointing. “What do you see?” she asks. Philip sees nothing and tells her not to be ridiculous.

But there was a woman there, and she was on fire.

Olivia takes herself closer to the paper, so close her breath disturbs the it, and fixes her eyes on that one place, so she is not distracted by the ever changing pattern.

What is your name, she whispers, fingertips close to the spot.

The woman doesn’t respond, and Olivia clutches at the place her heart would be if she were human because the woman must be dead, else she’d speak and share her name.

When Olivia sleeps that night, she sleeps with her back to the yellow wallpaper.

When she wakes, she eats the breakfast left for her, sipping her earl grey tea with milk. She does not look for the woman on fire.

She starts again when it becomes clear Mother would not be joining her. 

Olivia leaves the woman in fire behind. She tries not to focus too much on the pattern, but then another edges forward, begging to be looked at and Olivia cannot bear to deny it.

She looks.

When Mother comes later, she drags her to the spot, pointing with a shaking finger. Do you see them, she asks, the mother and the daughter there? They’re just like us, and her voice goes breathless, and she cannot bear to look away from her mother, from the mother and daughter in the wallpaper and she’s a shifter so she can see behind her and in front of her it’s not difficult it’s not hard at all.

Mother smiles and says she sees but Olivia can tell that her eyes aren’t quite focused on the right spot. There’s nothing there where she’s looking.

She cannot see Mother and Daughter in the wallpaper at all.

Olivia pretends not to know Mother’s lie, just as Mother pretends not to see. Olivia’s gaze falls to them from time to time as she eats and her mother asks what is she is looking at.

Nothing, she replies, and she shifts so subtly that mother never even sees, and she stares at the Mother and Daughter all day long as she blinks and nods about the wonderful evening her own mother had shared with Lance and another fine young gentleman — but don’t tell Lance, her mother giggles, fingers to her lip, and Olivia promises not to even though she has never even seen Lance….

One wall of her attic—no, her room now—is completely covered in the yellow wallpaper. Olivia runs her hands down it, even though Philip tells her not to because she will smudge it with her fingerprints and she wonders how he does not know that she does not have fingerprints, that she leaves nothing of herself behind except when she shifts and leaves everything behind that doesn’t matter anymore.

She presses her cheek against the paper. It smells—odd. There’s the pungent smell of the glue, of course, but there’s something else too.

A yellow smell.

Not like she imagines yellow things would smell. Like hay or sunlight or those yellow flowers that the plastic ones are modeled after.

But something. Something else.

She can’t place it and she knows she would be able to if she had ever known anything beyond this scrap of space trapped between four small walls.

She opens her eyes and sees another woman peering at her from the yellow. Her smile curves up, and not for the first or last time, Olivia thinks of meeting other people, other women like herself. 

Who would this one be?

A thief perhaps? A great thief, the greatest thief.

Perhaps such a thief would be able to steal her away from this place, and Olivia would leave a note so her mother would not be alarmed and perhaps they would do so many things that Olivia had heard about but had never done herself. 

They would get coffee and they would go to the theater and they would have the finest gowns and they would wear pearls clustered at their throats and they would smile smiles only meant for them.

Olivia closes her eyes and plants a fist over the smiling woman’s face. 

Guilt suffuses her skin so she claws it off her.

She could not leave Mother behind her in such a reckless adventure. 

It would break her heart, split her down right at the bones with worry if something were to happen to her dear, sweet girl.

She puts that unhappy skin in the tin pail so that no one would see, so that she could smile mirroring smiles with the smiling woman when her mother comes and declares how bright it is, how lovely everything is, how cheery her room is becoming.

The woman in the fire again. Olivia is dismayed that she’s come to the end of the pattern—that there is an end to the pattern—when she realizes that she had not looked closely enough.

She leans forward, transfixed.

It is not the same woman.

There is another woman in the fire and she becomes giddy with excitement and alarmed that there are two women on fire, trapped in this god forsaken yellow wallpaper.

She rushes to the first one and whispers in her burning ear.

There’s another one, just like you.

You are not alone.

She wishes, for a moment, that she knew their names so she might introduce them.

This time, she does not show Mother or Philip. Mother asks if there are more people, laughing, like she thinks it’s cute, and Olivia is touched that she’s remembered.

But she still says no, she hasn’t. What silly little things girls like her do.

Once, she would have said there are no girls like her. But now, she knows that isn’t true as the eyes in the back of her head, hidden by her hair, look upon the ladies in the fire, the mother and daughter trying to get out—she sees it now, yes they are trying to get out, scratching and crawling their way out. Philip had once seen the scratches, had told her that she was ruining the very fine paper that her mother had brought for her, ungrateful brat, but she knew it was them, and she was rooting for them, cheering them on—free yourself, free yourself, free yourself.

Mother promises to see her tomorrow, and she nods as she puts her eyes away.

Philip says that there’s a mark on the paper and he blames Olivia, but she knows the truth.

It’s a woman with black eyes. She’s looking for her boyfriend, the one great love of her life.

His name is Kevin. Has anybody seen Kevin? 

She misses him so. 

It hurts Olivia’s heart to hear her cry for him, for her to shake the paper, unable to get out. Sometimes the woman with black eyes swears that whoever did this to her will be in a great deal of pain once she gets out of this cursed prison.

Olivia hopes she finds him.

Both of them.

"Do you know a man named Kevin?" she asks Philip as they stare at the black marks, into her black eyes filled to the brim with feelings, not all of which Olivia recognized. 

Philip deigns to let his gaze slide towards her for a moment. “No.”

"I’m sorry to hear that," Olivia says to the woman with the black eyes.

She really is.

When they’re out, when they’re really out of this place, when it’s safe to be out, they’ll find him.

Promise, cross your heart and hope to die.

She finds another woman in the pattern that is unending, and she fears that the only way the pattern will end is when she runs out of paper, when there’s nothing but the thick cardboard roll and the final piece in her hand, sheered from the rest of itself. 

How could they? How could they?

But this woman—she howls at the moon. She used to be a wolf, sometimes. And a human too.

Someone who changed—someone like Olivia.

Once, Olivia bayed with her until Philip pounded the floor below her, the ceiling above him, with a broom handle and told her to shut the fuck up.

Olivia puts her finger to her lips and laughs.

She unrolls the paper—she must see them all without taking the time to paste the paper to the wall.

Olivia thinks there must be a great many women trapped in the pattern, shaking it until it almost comes free and lets them go but never does, trapped in this sickly, yellow paper.

And when Philip one day comes to her, his face very, very sad, to tell her that Bunny has died, Olivia’s eyes darts for the paper, half-expecting to find her there. 

The other women are listening.

He’s going to let her out of the attic. It was Bunny’s last wish, and her heart does a funny thing where it lurches and flushes at the same time, and Olivia trembles all over. 

Philip leaves, and leaves the door open for her.

This is unexpected. It has never happened before. 

Olivia creeps around the walls papered in that yellow paper, finding each one of the trapped women. I’ll come back, I’ll come back, she whispers. I’ll find a way to get you out, I promise.

And one day, after her plan to find and kill Bobby fails, when she hears that banging shot and she crumples to the floor, Olivia wakes to find herself trapped all in yellow too.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins GIlman


End file.
